The Beauty Cure

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“I love it when I discover data that confirms my biases.” Departmental faculty meetings were rarely a hotbed of genuine levity, but I got a fairly good laugh with that one in a meeting a couple of years ago. You see, academicians are wired the other way round. Briefly, you are supposed to settle on a question, design a study that allows you to examine the question from an objective perspective, do the study, examine the data and only then draw the conclusions warranted by the data. Bias has no place in scholarship. All questions are open to unbiased examination. True, that becomes more difficult these days when the deep government pockets, upon which major universities often feast are insisting that researchers commit to a certain range of conclusions before conducting their studies. That calls for increasingly creative grantsmanship. But while climate change may be off limits for the time being, last time I looked government-funded studies can still proceed from the assumption of a round earth and an expanding universe.

However, truth be told, my own research often started from “You know, I bet that .  .  .  and so on and so forth.” So while I tried to design inquiries from a “null hypothesis” objective, deep in my heart-of-hearts, I was leaning towards my bias. Hence, the unintentional jest mentioned above.

And now damned if it didn’t happen again. I was reading the New Scientist, January 25, 2020 article A Radical Idea Suggests that Mental Health Issues Have a Single Cause. If the general area is of interest to you, I suggest you track it down on the Internet, since I will, as usual, condense for brevity. (I’ll try to paste a link to the article in here, but if that doesn’t work, send me a message, and I’ll send you the link.) The article begins thus; “The discovery of a link between anxiety, depression, OCD and more is set to revolutionize how we think about these conditions - and offer new treatments.” The article eventually includes PTSD, bi-polar disorder and anorexia among the relevant conditions. It then goes on to explore this possible link among the various mental health conditions through a variety medical, psychiatric, genetic, psychological and sociological avenues eventually arriving at what, for lack of a more precise term, I will call IITBBO - Inheritable Inclination to Being Bummed Out - which we could further shorten to ITBO. 

Don’t let the tiny acronym fool you. ITBO can wreck your life. Even if you have never strayed over the line into some official diagnosis you have either known someone who has, or have flirted with the line with “blue days,” or “that outfit makes me look fat,” or “I had that dream again.” Those stinging little bummers from the down side of life. When the little bummers swell up and start to fill too many of your waking and sleeping moments, they can suck the joy out of life.

The article does discuss a number of possible treatments, but since the implicated conditions are traditionally seen as “separate,” the work seems a little thin here on the amelioration side, especially since the title clearly primes us for “new treatments.”

To which I respond, “Well, duh? Have you never heard of Distilled Harmony?” To which I’m sure the authors of the article would universally respond, “No. What’s that? And what does it have to do with ITBO?” (They wouldn’t really use the ITBO acronym, but you know what I mean.)

“Well, now that you ask . . . .” I reply.

As long-time readers here on The Wall know, Distilled Harmony is a way of thinking about, and behaving in, the world. Over the last decade and change, its tenets have become my mantra, my rosary if you will; Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. As I read the article that laid out the pervasive grey depressive cloud that encompasses ITBO, it became increasingly obvious to me that, particularly in light of a seeming lack of other options, Distilled Harmony seems tailor-made to combat ITBO.  

Ordinarily I present the tenets of Distilled Harmony in the order given above with the mandate to Foster Harmony leading the pack. But when confronting ITBO the second tenet, Enable Beauty, pulls up alongside. It is important to note that when I consider Distilled Harmony, I often conflate Enable and Create.  Enable Beauty can be Create Beauty, switch hitters of equal power. And the simple truth is that it is very difficult to give in to the morbid music of ITBO, if you are actively engaged in making something beautiful.

As Saul Leiter, photographer and artist, wrote in his book, In No Great Hurry, “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty—a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologize for it.” Obviously this puts Leiter on the other side of the creative table from the iconic Heironymus Bosch work Garden of Earthly Delights, or Picasso’s Guernica. Those are ITBO classics and, like much currently popular dystopian “art,” seem more inclined to wallow in the despair that permeates ITBO, than to free us from its clutches. I’m on Leiter’s side.

I can truthfully say that I am never depressed, or even mildly bummed out, when I am drawing, or coloring, painting, sculpting, taking beautiful photos, writing a poem or a song, or sharing thoughts with you here on The Wall. ITBO may be snarking around in the dark outside, looking for a chink in the armor of beauty, but it will hunt in vain. Beauty, especially when snuggled within the arms of Distilled Harmony, has no weak spots. 

So if you would blunt ITBO, create beauty. Paint, draw, sing, sculpt, write, whistle and dance - and do it all as if no one was watching. Because, and this is vital, when we create beauty, we are the final authority as to what is beautiful. The products of our hands and hearts need not reside in the great museums and galleries of the world. Our songs need not be on the lips of millions. Our poems and paintings need not attract “followers” without number. There is but one critical objective to the art we create in the pursuit of beauty, it must make us smile. Just us.

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